The King O'Comedy

Just how did an affable Irishman become the clown prince of Hollywood? Chris O'Dowd talks hanging with Judd, laughing it up with Lena, and shows us how having a supermodel draped all over him like a human cheetah ain't no thing. Chris, we're laughing with you buddy

Stuart McGurk is GQ's Associate Editor and the 2017 PPA Magazine Writer of the Year. Follow him on Twitter @stuartmcgurk

Tuesday 1 April 2014

Warning: Contains major Calvary spoilers...

Chris O'Dowd remembers clearly his first glowing review. It was 2003, O'Dowd was a callow 23-year-old, and he'd just landed a part in Irish medical drama The Clinic, which, he says, was best described as an Irish version of Cold Feet, but set around a GP's office.

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It was on RTÉ - essentially the Irish BBC - and everyone used to watch it. The show had a 60 per cent audience share.

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Cuban Fury, co-starring Nick Frost), to Sky 1 shows (his own Emmy-winning series Moone Boy, the second series of which just started); to, soon, the ultimate comedy crowning, working with Bill Murray in the forthcoming St Vincent De Van Nuys.

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It said, 'Chris O'Dowd played the character of Brendan Davenport, the bookkeeper with autism, with the most beautiful grace. He didn't overact it, he didn't overegg it.'"

O'Dowd can barely continue. He's cracking up. He takes a sip from his pint, puts it back down, shakes his head, and makes the kind of face you would if you've just watched someone run full pelt into a glass conservatory door. A perfect split between abject horror and barely contained hilarity. "And... he didn't... he didn't have autism. Oh man, that was a weird read. That was really bad!"

It's a good story - certainly a funny story - told in high spirits over several beers at O'Dowd's local bar in West Hollywood.

But also, O'Dowd clearly realises, a telling one. The Clinic was a drama, so, the logic at the Irish Times went, of course his part was a dramatic one.

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Yet if O'Dowd's remarkable rise since could be said to be down to anything, it's how, from Apatow's films to Dunham's HBO half-hours, the lines have blurred. "Funny" has relaxed, calmed down, realised that without drama, the funny ain't that funny, and maybe that trying to separate the two was nonsense in the first place.

The thing I have against comedy is it feels like you need to produce a joke at the end of everything. I'm hoping to leave that behind

Which is both why Chris O'Dowd - never a comic, but then hardly your standard Rada guy either - has become the transatlantic success story he has, and how unlikely all of it seems. "I mean, most of the time it feels like shows like

Girls are being punished for having the ability to do both things," O'Dowd says at one point. "It's extraordinary! And I find that with Judd's films as well. I mean, I thought The Butler [which starred Oprah Winfrey, and was serious with a capital S] was a comedy! Like, that film f***ing made me laugh. I don't think any of it was deliberate." "I'm aware of my own capability," he adds. "I'm not capable of doing something like Sacha [Baron Cohen] does or like Jim Carrey does, creating these huge, incredible comic performances. The one thing I think I'm good at is making people believe what I'm doing, like that it's not mad or like it's not totally out of character."

He pauses. "I can," he says with a grin, "play a slacker with the best of them."

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Put another way: O'Dowd may be the first person to take Hollywood by storm by never trying too hard. +++

Chris O'Dowd is a tall man trapped in an even taller man's body.

At 6ft 3in and bear-broad, he feels like a man who's ordered a body a couple of sizes too big, in the hope he'll grow into it, and never quite has. Partly, it's the face - cherub-like, despite the beard, oddly small, forever sporting an expression that seems to suggest he's just felt something unexpected in his pocket. Jeans, shirt and linen jacket: all rumpled.

The bar where we meet - The Village Idiot; make your own joke - is just around the corner from where O'Dowd has recently bought a house with his wife, the journalist Dawn O'Porter (she took the O when they married, but left the Dowd). It's the kind of place - thick rustic wood bar, exposed brickwork, craft beers with backstory - that has spent a great deal of money to look like it hasn't spent a great deal of money. But, by LA standards, it's unpretentious, relaxed, and more importantly, for Liverpool fan O'Dowd, shows live Premier League football, a rarity in a city where the kick-off time in the UK translates to a 7am start.

But the football, it seems, is just about the only thing he misses about the move. "Oh f*** yeah! I mean, I'm done with it, I'm done with London.

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It's such a ballache. For the first time this year, I felt, for whatever reason, done with London. And I've been wracking my head for why. And I think it's that I'd been there for 12 or 13 years, and I do love it so much, but sometimes you just need a break from somewhere."

It was another break that led O'Dowd here in the first place. In 2008, already an established UK star thanks to The IT Crowd, where he played slacker techie Roy, he had just split with his girlfriend of eight years, and needed a change. "It was a big break-up. It was kinda hard. We'd lived together in London, and I thought, you know, maybe I'll do the whole fresh start thing and move to LA."

Plus, he had become fed up of how hard things were to get off the ground back home. He'd been through the rigmarole of trying to get a film made in London, he says, "and God it's tedious. Like, you literally wait years. And even then, they all seem so... like, the great ones are amazing. But the rest of them all feel like a slightly better version of EastEnders. You know, all those London-based movies, like we haven't had enough London gangsters!

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He didn't tell his family ("I probably said, 'Oh, I'll be away for a week.' I'm not that person. I'm terrified of having egg on my face"). He wasn't sure how long he planned to stay if nothing came off ("But I live pretty cheap, and I was staying on a friend's couch"). But within weeks, success. Of sorts.

He found himself cast in a big Hollywood remake of

Gulliver's Travels with Jack Black and Jason Siegel and was sent straight back to London to shoot it. It was not, however, to be his big break. Mainly, because it was awful. To his credit, O'Dowd is honest about the film's deficiencies. "I mean, it was essentially a comedy," he says. "But there's not a huge amount of actual comedy in that film. I can only describe it as being on a horse and riding head-on at jokes. You know, there's no real control. I'm not using the horse. The horse is just guiding me towards this huge explosion of comedy. But the horse doesn't have a sense of humour. So I'm being flogged by a dead horse. I don't think there was any point where we felt it was going well.

The director was a lovely guy. But it was the weird people behind it [at the studio]. I don't know what they wanted. We could tell he was reshooting scenes that he was already happy with."

As much as Bridesmaids was to later showcase what he was best at - the quieter character comedy that doesn't rush at jokes head-on; O'Dowd as the everyguy not so much getting the girl as bumbling his way towards her - it was Gulliver's Travels that made it clear what he wanted to stay away from.

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What he wanted - and the real reason he went to LA in the first place - only became clear to him later. He took Dawn - then his girlfriend - to a comedy club in LA not far from where we're sitting to watch the stand-up Louis CK. He and CK shared the same manager, so O'Dowd went backstage after the show to meet him, when who should walk in but Judd Apatow - Hollywood's reigning nerd-king of big-screen comedy, behind everything from Knocked Up and

Anchorman to Superbad and The Five-Year Engagement.

I think what I do lends itself to female writing. I think I'm good at working with really funny women and letting them nail it

He whispered to Dawn in reverent tones: "That's Judd Apatow."

Her reply: "Who's Judd Apatow?" "And then," says O'Dowd to me now, "before I even realised it was true, I said, 'He's kind of the reason I'm in the States. It's his kind of brand of comedy that I've been watching for five or six years. It's what I love and it's probably the kind of marketplace that I can put myself in.' And then, of course, I went for the audition for Bridesmaids..." +++

It's no coincidence that the work O'Dowd has had the most success in is written by women - from Bridesmaids, written by Kristen Wiig, where he played her love-interest small-town cop, to Dunham's Girls, to Friends With Kids, written by Jennifer Westfeldt, otherwise known as Jon Hamm's partner. Even Judd Apatow is widely acknowledged to be one of Hollywood's few male comedy impresarios who writes equally well from male and female points of view. "Yeah, you can always tell it's a women's writing," says O'Dowd, "because it goes on and on and on. No, I'm joking! But without being too blunt about it, it's simply that the female characters are believable. I mean, some of the shit that's out there! It's extraordinary."

But why does he suit those films? "Well, I'm not macho."

Don't say that, Chris. "Haha, you know, I'm not! And I feel like a lot of films are written for, I don't know, Ashton Kutcher or whoever."

Is Ashton Kutcher macho? "Haha. Um. No, probably not! No, not macho at all! I don't know what I mean. Look, I think what I do well tends to lend itself to female writing because one of the things I'm good at is that I don't need to be at the centre of things. I think I'm good working with really funny women and letting them nail it, like with Lena or Kristen or whoever. Sometimes when you watch comedians act it feels like if they don't have the next gag, they're not really listening."

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O'Dowd grew up in Boyle, a sleepy town in County Roscommon, at the foot of the Curlew Mountains. It's the kind of place you'd imagine the Irish tourist might go to film "Visit Ireland" - slo-mo shots of fly-fishers casting lines in the River Boyle, the remains of the 12th-century abbey carefully framed in the background.

The reality, as ever, was slightly different. He grew up the youngest of five children - one older brother, three older sisters - and remembers his childhood as idyllic, if chaotic.

His mother was a psychotherapist and his father a sign painter, and, even with the family all crammed together in a three bedroom house, they were often behind on their mortgage. Being a small town, the bank manager would visit in person and when he did, his mother would often be too embarrassed to go to the door, so would direct everyone to hide. "The only problem was sometimes he would go around to the back door, which was glass, so my mum would then get behind the curtains at the front, between them and the glass. So this one time he [the bank manager] was at the back, knocking, knocking, but he then decided to come around to the front again. Only to see my mother like this" - he affects the pose of a frozen mime artist, hands pressed against the glass - "Awful! Can you imagine? And the best bit was, oh God, she did this thing where she pretended to be cleaning one of the windows! With just her hands!" We're both almost crying with laughter now. "Oh God, that's so great."

He remembers, too, that comedy was a way to diffuse tension growing up, not least when his parents were divorcing in his late teens.

There was no outlet for comedy at Lamda. It was so pretentious. They thought I was a smartarse - I took the piss out of everything

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Moone Boy, which is largely based on his own childhood, and which sees him playing the imaginary friend of his childhood self, played by schoolboy David Rawle.

What's interesting about Moone Boy is that O'Dowd started writing it the week after Bridesmaids was released. Wasn't he being inundated with film offers at the time? "Well, everything was different, and I needed something to ground me, and it [filming in his home town] served that purpose.

But in a funny kind of way, I was lucky that the offers that came after Bridesmaids just weren't great. Like, loads of money, but the films weren't good. It was very easy not to do them."

After doing a degree in politics and pondering a career as a political speechwriter,- he went to the London Academy Of Music And Dramatic Art, but couldn't take it seriously, and ended up leaving before he graduated. "There was no outlet for comedy. It was just so pretentious.

They just thought I was a smartarse because I would take the piss out of everything all the time. They'd be like, 'Today, we're going to pretend to be a baby', and for like three hours, all these post-grads in their thirties and forties would be crawling around on all fours, pretending to be f***ing babies!

I mean, they [Lamda] are living in the past. In two years, we had one week of film and TV. One week! Taught by some guy who had like a f***ing VHS camcorder!"

O'Dowd may never have any official comedic training, but that didn't mean he didn't train in improv. He just did it while working in a call centre. His task, one of his many odd jobs in his early twenties, was to call people and ask them to donate to save endangered species. The only problem was, people didn't want to save them. "More often than not," he says, "it was a bat in New Zealand or something. I'd tell people about them, and they'd be like, 'F***ing great! I hope they all die!' Or they'd be this man-eating beaver, and they'd say, 'Oh, f***ing shoot it. You want bullets? Is that what you want?'" So, behind on his donation targets ("It was like

Glengarry Glen Ross"), he started making animals up. Such as the Tiger Swan. "That made me the most money. I raised more than £300,000 on that, just by myself. A swan with the stripes of a tiger. Very rare. Lives in Mali. People would say, 'I've never heard of it!', and I'd be like, well, it's f***ing rare! If they were everywhere, we'd be fine! I wouldn't have called!"

Or the Dolphinwhale. "The Dolphinwhale was the size of a whale, but it loved humans.

Loved swimming with people, so would always get beached. Very sad."

Or even the Red Squid. "You have the black squid, providing the black ink for black pens. But then you have the Red Squid, providing the red ink... it's the teacher's favourite!"

For all O'Dowd's success in comedy, there is a clear feeling from him that he wants, in the way of many comic actors, to prove himself doing serious drama. "As time goes on, you realise your limitations," he says. "The one thing I do have against comedy is sometimes it feels like you really do need to produce a joke at the end of everything," and he says, it's hard to fully immerse in a role. "I'm hoping I'll be able to leave all that behind."

For one, he's about to start rehearsals for Of Mice And Men on Broadway with James Franco. More immediately, he'll next be seen in Calvary, the latest jet-black comedy-drama from John Michael McDonagh (The Guard), where O'Dowd plays a man abused as a child by a priest, and threatens to exact revenge.

Despite the juicy part, O'Dowd almost turned down the role. "I knew it was from John Michael McDonagh, and about priests, and I was like, you know what, I'm not interested. Because I presumed it was going to be anti-priest. And my relationship with priests has always been positive. He said, 'No, my relationship with priests is really good. My problem is with religion.' The same as me."

I'm good at making people believe what I'm doing. I can play a slacker with the best of them

What problems with religion? "For most of my life, I've been, 'Hey, I'm not into it, but I respect your right to believe -whatever you want'. But as time goes on, weirdly, I'm growing less liberal. I'm more like, 'No, religion is ruining the world, you need to stop!' There's going to be a turning point where it's going to be like racism. You know, 'You're not allowed to say that weird shit! It's mad! And you're making everybody crazy!' And you know, now America can't have a president that doesn't say he believes in God. So we're f***ed! Like, they f***ed everything! You wanna go and live in your weird cult and talk about a man who lives in a cloud, you do that, but don't. I mean, you really think Barack Obama believes in God? No way!" +++

When Calvary premiered at Sundance in January, it was met with universal praise. The Guardian called it "puckish and playful, mercurial and clever, rattling with gallows laughter".

The Hollywood Reporter called it "a film of rich layers - glorious comedic highs are interwoven with meditative moments and flashes of startling hostility and violence". Variety said fans of O'Dowd "will see an unexpected side of him". No one said if it was a comedy or not.

For O'Dowd, draining his last beer, off to dinner with his wife, when I ask what comes next, he talks about plans for a big-screen comedy about male weight loss, the pair of children's books he's currently writing, based on Moone Boy, and a long-standing idea for a big Christmas film. "But you know what, I actually have no idea what I'll do next.

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But I bet it'll be what you don't expect."

With special thanks to model Jessica Hart. Jessica styled by Laury Smith. Chris styled by Michael Fisher. Grooming Jamie Taylor at the Wall Group using Recipe For Men. Hair Rob Talty at The Magnet Agency using Bumble And Bumble. Make-up Shane Paish at the Walter Schupfer Agency. Manicure Cheryl Scruggs. Jessica Hart is at Chadwick models. chadwickmodels.com. Production Deborah Burch at Snog Productions Inc.